Fred Luter and Barack Obama: Firsts in Political Theology

This is an era of firsts. In 2008, the United States elected its first non-white president. And now, a denomination founded to assert the identity of southern white slaveholders, the Southern Baptist Convention, has elected its first non-white president. The pastor of a large church in New Orleans, Fred Luter now heads the largest Protestant denomination (albeit one that is shrinking) in the United States. What does it tell us about political theology in America?

One thing the Luter and Obama phenomena reveal is how much the United States has changed from the 1960s. Then, if African Americans claimed that “Jesus was black,” they could be denounced by whites (as Vernon Jordan was for performing as Jesus during a college theatrical play) or maligned by other blacks (as James Cone so often was). Then, the Southern Baptists were busily defending segregation as a defense of their Christianity.

Now, Obama not only received the Democratic nomination in 2008, but won the election, even though his Chicago pastor had declared that “Jesus was a black man.” Now, Reverend Luter embodies not just the push of the Southern Baptists to integrate, but to do so with people of color in power.

“Change” has happened, and it’s not just a one-word political slogan put onto a neat graphic.

Reverend Luter’s election also troubles the waters of religious scholarship. For decades, religious historians have defined “evangelicals” and “fundamentalism” almost uniformly as white. They have forgotten Donald Mathews amazing old book Religion in the Old South, where Protestant evangelicalism was built by whites and blacks interacting in the spiritual and social terrain of the cotton belt. Instead scholars have followed the work of George Marsden who wrote about fundamentalism and society in the early twentieth century and considered racial segregation and violence so inconsequential that he basically left it out. The white people he studied did not say much about lynching so it must not matter too much to studying them.

And then, when Time magazine listed a “top 25” most influential evangelicals several years ago, they included one African American (Reverend T. D. Jakes) and about 20 white men. Reverend Luter would not make their list, because he didn’t seem to have “influence.” But clearly, pastors like him, or San Diego’s Miles McPherson, have influence. They minister to large congregations (McPherson’s Rock church is not only massive, but also multiracial). They impact the lives of moms and musicians, addicts and adolescents, cops and college kids.

Reverend Luter did not make Time’s list in 2005 because the magazine wasn’t looking for African Americans and because they didn’t know where to look. Since they considered “evangelicalism” primarily an intellectual movement, they missed religion in the marketplace of the real.

A new list will probably include him, but only because he has achieved media prominence. And this is the final piece of what Reverend Luter’s election shows me: that for the mass media, a person only has “influence” if they make highlights and offer sound bites. But Reverend Luter was elected president because he had influence; he had it before main news outlets knew who he was. Scholars should not fall into the same trap. We don’t have to wait for the New York Times or CNN to tell us who is transforming our political theology. We can look around and tell them who is.

 

Edward J. Blum teaches history at San Diego State University and is a regular blogger at Religion in American History. He is the author of several books on race, religion, and politics in United States history, including the forthcoming The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America.